Speakers
(Plenary speaker) Julia Kuehn is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has postgraduate degrees from the Universities of Oxford, Bonn and London, and also completed the Habilitation at the University of Bamberg. Her research interests lie in Victorian literature and culture, travel writing (related to China) and critical theory. She has published in international journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Studies in Travel Writing, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Writing. Julia’s current projects include a study of representations of Hong Kong in Victorian travel writing and a comparative study of nineteenth-century German and British realist prose.
(Plenary speaker) Nikki Hessell is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at the University of Wellington.
Geoff Baker is Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His research and teaching focus primarily on ideas of realism in the novel, especially in western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to articles on political aesthetics, literary ethics, and the law in Victorian literature, he has published Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Ohio State UP, 2009) and The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists (Palgrave, 2017). His current book project examines the roles of belief and evidence in nineteenth-century British novels from Austen to Trollope against the backdrop of evolving legal understandings of evidence.
David Chandler is Professor in the English Department at Doshisha University, Kyoto, having obtained his D.Phil at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the British Romantic Period, especially the work of the Lake poets, as well as reviewing and writing on opera and musical theatre, including edited books on the composers Alfredo Catalani and Italo Montemezzi. He is a founding director of Retrospect Opera, a registered charity, a trustee of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, and a Fellow of the English Association. Much of his recent work has been on musical adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novels.
Steve Clark is Professor of English Literature at the University of Tokyo.
Andrew Elliott is an associate professor at Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English from University of Leeds, and his Ph.D from Kyoto University, with a thesis exploring East-West encounters in Anglophone travel writing about Bakumatsu and Meiji Japan through attention to the practice and writing of “interior travel” (naichi ryokō). He has published on this and related topics in English Language Notes, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies and, most recently, Studies in Travel Writing. A chapter on interior travel is included in The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1: Travellers and Tourists (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Presently, he is co-editing a special edition of Japan Review (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) on tourism, war, and modern Japan.
Hsu, Li-Hsin is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh. She has published in international journals such as The Emily Dickinson Journal and Symbiosis. Her research interests include Dickinson studies, Transatlantic studies, reception history, and ecocriticism. Her recent project involves the representations of space and motion in the works of a number of nineteenth-century writers, including Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, David Henry Thoreau, and Helen Hunt Jackson.
Anna Johnston is an ARC Future Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and Associate Professor in English Literature in the School of Communication and Arts. A graduate of the University of Queensland, Anna has worked at the University of Tasmania, where she was Director of the Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath (2013-16) and an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow (2007-14). In 2014-15, Anna was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo. She has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, focussing on literary and cultural history: her most recent monograph is The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (UWA Press 2011). She has particular interests in settler colonialism, travel writing, and missionary writing and empire.
Tomoe Kumojima is a Lecturer at the CORE of STEM and the International Exchange Centre, Nara Women’s University, Japan. She completed her PhD in English Literature in 2013. Her thesis was on writings by Victorian female travellers to Meiji Japan with special focus on three long-term residents, namely Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes, and the ethical possibility of female transnational friendship. Her current research project explores travel writing and fictional narratives about Japan by women in the British Empire between 1853 and 1945. It places special emphasis on the significant roles pioneering women in science played in the literary representation of the Far Eastern country by defying the gender dichotomy and bridging the art/science gap. It also examines the literary contributions made by Anglo-Japanese female writers and their political implications in the diplomatic relationship between the two empires.
Edward Marx studied English at Berkeley and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and is currently associate professor of British and American literature and culture at Ehime University, Matsuyama. He is the author of The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2004), Leonie Gilmour: When East Weds West (Botchan Books, 2013), and a forthcoming biography of Yone Noguchi (Botchan Books), along with various essays: “Women Writing Japan,” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1880-1920 (Palgrave, 2016), "Haiku in English Reconsidered," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 22 (2008), “No Dancing: Yone Noguchi in Yeats's Japan,” Yeats Annual, no. 17 (Macmillan, 2007), and “How We Lost Kafiristan,” Representations 67 (1999), among others.
Kevin Riordan is Assistant Professor of 20th- and 21st-Century Literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and a BA in English and Theater & Dance from Amherst College. Prior to joining NTU, Riordan taught in the Writing Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he also served as Associate Director for the Writing Center. Riordan's research interests include modernism, world literature, and theater and performance studies. His recent work has appeared in Modern Drama, Performance Research, and Intertexts, and he has articles forthcoming in American Studies, affirmations, and Modernism/modernity. Riordan is currently at work on his first monograph, a performance history of the around-the-world tour.
Chie Suzuki is an MA student in the graduate program in English Language and Literature at Tsuda University in Tokyo. Her research interests include gender rhetoric in Victorian poetry with a special focus on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alfred Tennyson. Her MA thesis examines politics of “masculinity” and Englishness in Hopkins’ prosody. Born and raised in Yokohama, she is also interested in how the reception of Western cultures, especially through Japanese magazines and textbooks, affected domestic attitudes in the modernizing process of the nineteenth-century Japan, particularly in relation to the British Empire. Her forthcoming research project looks at how Shakespeare’s sonnets were understood, used and translated into Japanese from the Meiji era to the present. Her article summary on Danish researcher Anne Simonsen’s paper “Japanese Leather Wallpaper in Copenhagen” appears in the latest issue of Kagu-Dougu-Shitunai- Shi [The Journal of the Japan Society for the History of Interiors, Furniture and Tools].
Mikko Toivanen is currently pursuing a PhD in history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, with a thesis project that examines the changing cultures of travel in the British and Dutch colonies of Southeast Asia around the middle of the nineteenth century. He has previously studied at the University of Warwick in the UK and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Jennifer S. Tuttle is Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health at the University of New England in Maine, where she directs an archives called the Maine Women Writers Collection. In 2017 she completed a term as editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She is editor of the first recovered edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1911 western novel The Crux (2002) and co-editor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts (2011, with Carol Farley Kessler) and The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2009, with Denise D. Knight). Her published essays on Gilman, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Owen Wister explore intersections among gender and medical discourse in writing about the material and discursive construct of the US West. Her current book project has the working title “Unsettling the US Imperial Pacific: American Nervousness in California Women’s Writing, 1848-1915.”
Ayako Wada is Professor of English at Tottori University. She finished her Ph.D. in the University of Durham in 1995. Her publications include ‘Blake’s Oriental Heterodoxy: Yanagi’s Perception of Blake’ in The Reception of Blake in the Orient, edited by Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki (2006), ‘Turning the Pages: Blake’s Notebook and its Digital Transformation’ in Digital Romanticisms, a special issue of Poetica edited by Steve Clark (2013), ‘Visions of the Love Triangle and Adulterous Birth in Blake’s The Four Zoas’ in Sexy Blake, edited by Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (2013), and ‘Flora Japonica: Linnaean Connections Between Britain and Japan during the Romantic Period’ in British Romanticism in Asia, edited by Alex Watson and Laurence Williams (forthcoming).
Alex Watson is Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Comparative Literature at Nagoya University. Tokyo. He is the author of Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). More recently, he has authored articles on paratexts in travel writing, Constantin de Volney, J. G. Ballard, Roland Barthes, Robert Southey and John Gibson Lockhart and co-edited an issue of POETICA ('Romantic Connections', Yushodo Press, Tokyo, 2015). Currently, he is co-editing (with Laurence Williams, University of Tokyo) a volume of scholarly essays entitled British Romanticism in Asia (prospectively for Palgrave) and writing an advanced textbook for Asian students on British cinema, a monograph on the use of the ruin motif in nineteenth-century British travel writing and book chapters on Rabindranath Tagore, Lafcadio Hearn, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Laurence Williams is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tokyo: before that, he was a Commonwealth postdoctoral fellow at the Burney Centre, McGill University. His research centres on British travel writing to Japan and China, particularly examining the ways in which broader patterns of trade flows, diplomatic relations and cultural exchange are represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and popular culture. He has recently co-edited (with Steve Clark) a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on Isabella Bird (2017), and published articles in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (Palgrave, 2015). He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Reception of British Romanticism in Asia (with Alex Watson). He holds a D.Phil from Oxford.
